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Chris woke at approximately 3:04am.The room was dark and still, the city a dim smear beyond the blinds. He could hear his son crying somewhere in the apartment. Still crying. The bed was empty beyond himself and, after a moment of paralysis, Chris rolled to his feet.She was there, as he knew she would be, sitting in the dark. She sat where the ambient haze of the city would not reach her, tucked beyond sight on the floor with her knees pulled up tight around the child where he wailed and wailed and wailed. Even in the darkness Chris could tell she was naked. Only when he drew closer did he see she was crying, too.Piers had been crying for the last thirty-six hours, almost ceaselessly. The only reprieve came when his body could no longer bear the exhaustion and he fell unconscious, and they had taken him to the hospital and had him put under surveillance. Eventually, overcome and unable to find anything particularly wrong with him, they had discharged him home again.Still he did not stop.The woman was afraid. Chris watched as she devolved into something shivering and small and mute. How she held Piers’s quivering body to her naked breast, crouched in a corner, as if it might somehow make things better. Her eyes gleamed bright in the dark as Chris went to her, sliding down the wall beside her. He glanced at the clock. Thirty-seven hours, now.And then the woman jerked and yelped, and the stillness of the early morning was shattered, and she held her hand up and away as if she had been burned or pinched or stung; Chris’s eyes leapt to it, his heart shooting off at a sprint by the distinct edge of pain in her voice, and he saw that she was bleeding.Piers was a bit of a biter, they’d learned, which wasn’t a problem until his teeth began coming through and he felt compelled to bite everything within reach. He seemed perfectly happy gnawing away on his mother’s fingers, but Chris was still uncertain, still afraid. The wound in his side had well and truly healed over, but whenever he caught sight of the woman’s red, bitten hands, it would twinge. Petyr had assured him - very politely, given that Chris had called him at approximately one o’clock in the morning - that even if Piers was a pricolici, he would only be able to transmit the disease while changed, and that they really had nothing to worry about.Blood dripped down the woman’s hand, the inside of her wrist, crawling towards the seam of her elbow. Piers would bite, but he had never drawn blood before, and certainly not this much. Her face was ashen, panicked, bright even in the absence of light. Before Chris could so much as react the woman unfolded and clutched her baby like he might be torn from her, and with her uninjured hand forced his mouth open. His teeth glimmered for a moment before they were obscured by the woman’s fingers, reaching into his mouth as they had once reached into Chris’s, catching on the same pointed edge. Her bloodied hand went to his brow and pressed against it, anointing him in a dark smear.She didn’t say anything; the low, fretting wail that rose from her told Chris all he needed to know.Teeth and fever.He vaulted to his feet. Action had always been his friend, especially in the face of panic, of despair - he hit the lights and Piers began to shriek even louder, stifling the sound of the woman’s crying. Chris drew the blinds in every room, switched on every light, dispelled every shadow. His heart pounded in his throat. His side ached. For a moment he stopped, arrested by the sight of his reflection in the bathroom mirror, and he peered into his own eyes for a moment too long.He took the bathrobe from the back of the door and wrapped the woman in it, baby and all. Helped her to the couch and saw how exhausted she was, too - she hadn’t slept at all. Chris had been too exhausted to fight it off, but unlike him, she was young and resilient and very strange. He went to heat some water and pick up his phone from where it lay face-down beside the throw bowl. He had Petyr on speed-dial, these days.The dial tone felt eternal. Chris tried to time his breathing to it.“Hello!” Petyr exclaimed – finally, finally – when he picked up. Chris had always found his good mood a little abrasive. And then, as if Petyr had realized just what time it was for Chris, he said, “Is something wrong?”Chris breathed like he’d been running, or crying. He wondered if Petyr could hear the pounding of his pulse through the phone. “He’s -- when do they change? For the first time? The babies –,”Petyr made a low, soothing noise; not quite speech, but very close to it, and Chris heard the commotion in the background cease. The closing of a door, the rush of Petyr’s exhale as he sat. “Piers is changing? Now?”Hearing it put that way – calmly, almost clinically – made Chris’s head spin. Made it real. His eyes stung as he glanced over his shoulder to where the sleeve of the bathrobe was stained red and drying brown. Piers’s wailing drove through him, through the phone, impossible for Petyr not to hear. Chris did not say yes – he didn’t say anything at all. His environment spoke for him, just as audible to Petyr as his voice would have been.“He bit her,” Chris rasped into the phone. “Deep. His teeth are –,” he turned again, then, to find the woman watching him with unnerving stillness. “Teeth?” he asked, and she nodded, and to Petyr he repeated, “Teeth.”“Sharp?”“Yes.” Like mine were, the first time. “Okay.” Petyr paused to listen to the rush of Chris’s breath. It was an overwhelmingly tender silence, and Chris could practically see the concerned pucker of Petyr’s brow, the way his eyes seemed to darken in worry. “It’ll be alright, Chris. He’ll be fine. Do you remember how it was for you, the first time you changed?”Chris nodded like Petyr could see him.“It will be like that. He won’t understand it, and it is frightening, but he will survive it.”“Does it – hurt?” Chris whispered, barely a croak of a sound.“As much as it did for you. But the first time is always the hardest, and it will get easier.” Then he paused, and with a wry smile Chris could hear rather than see, he added, “At least this way you will know for certain.”Chris would have called him a bastard if he’d had the resolve. But everything was crumbling quickly, now, and he wasn’t sure which way he would devolve.“Feeding him meat might help,” Petyr said, then, quietly. “It might help ease the hunger a little.”Oh, yes. Chris remembered the hunger. he remembered it better than anything, even the pain. “Okay,” he said.“Swaddling might also be helpful,” Petyr continued. “I’m sorry I can’t be of greater aid. I know a great deal about this disease on a molecular level, but –,”“It’s fine,” Chris rasped out. His ears had started ringing, but he felt bolstered, somehow, made confident by his own experience. “It’s – thank you. I mean it, Petyr. You’ve done a lot for us.”He could hear Petyr’s smile again. “Of course. I –,” then there was a clatter, and a cascade of muffled Romanian, and the sound of a slamming door. “I’m afraid I have to cut things short,” Petyr said. “I’m at work, but –,”“It’s fine,” Chris said again. “Go. Thank you, again. You’ve been a huge help.”“Call me whenever you need to,” Petyr told him like he always did.“I will.”The call disconnected. Chris’s ears were still ringing. He turned and found the woman still watching him, eyes hare-bright in the dark. He didn’t bother telling her what Petyr said; she had heard all of it.The phantom hunger still lingered at the back of his mind like a long, narrow shadow. It didn’t bother him as much anymore, but he was never quite able to pass it from his consciousness, and it remained tucked away at the back of his memories. There was a half-eaten packet of ground turkey in the fridge; it’d have to do. He heated it up a little bit, watching the rotations of the microwave with increasing desperation. Cut it up into tiny little pieces with sweating hands, wondering if any other parent felt this level of anxiety over their child’s meal. Piers continued to cry.He brought it out and handed it to the woman, who looked just about ready to let Piers devour her whole hand. He was already gnawing on it with his sharp, tearing teeth, the woman sitting there pale-faced and unmoving, though the veil was torn in the twitching of her eyes. She bled profusely, the sleeve of the robe soaked with it, and Piers’s face was smeared with the stuff. Chris somehow managed to detach the two of them, occupying Piers’s mouth instead with the meat in his little Thomas the Tank Engine bowl, which he devoured with ferocity unbefitting of a baby – a ferocity Chris recognised. His unceasing wails became hiccupping sobs, though the pinched tone of them lessened as he ate.Chris still held the woman’s wrist, her hand limp. He could see the white glint of bone in the mess of her forefinger. He knew then, just by looking at her, that she would not be much use – nothing like she had been when he had changed. Where she had once been fortified and determined she now seemed to be sinking into the choking tides of hopelessness, and Chris couldn’t help but wonder what was different.The first-aid kit came out of the bathroom cabinet. They’d swaddled Piers when he was younger and Chris had done it enough times then to do it now, even when his hands were shaking so violently that they were almost beyond usefulness. Piers was hardly happy with it, but Chris knew better than most that what was good for you was hardly ever comfortable. And so he swaddled him tight, lay him in his crib, and closed the door on his wailing.It didn’t feel right, leaving him like that. Just for a few minutes, he reassured himself. Just for a little bit. “You’ll need stitches,” Chris told the woman when he went to tend her hand. Strangely, she did not speak to him, not even to question the absence of their child. She stared down at where Piers had bitten through her finger, her face seizing slightly.“Like father, like son,” she said eventually, and when Chris glanced at her face he found a smile that cut clean through the shadow of her expression. He was so relieved to see it that he laughed, a quiet, breathy sort of thing, and kissed her.“You didn’t let me go quite as wild,” he said against her mouth. He felt the smile drop away and, worried he had said the wrong thing, drew back a little. But she did not look distressed to any degree, and instead eyed him with an intense sort of interest.“No,” she corrected. “ You did not let you go quite as wild.” She licked her teeth, wetted her lips, and her smile returned again, this time thinner, more sardonic. “ I would have let you do anything.”Chris hated how his loins lurched. Now was not the time to be getting turned on; they both should have known better. Piers was very obviously in pain and surely in danger of rupturing his vocal cords, and the woman was more than a little injured – the smell of her blood thick and delicious in the air and – and all Chris could think about in that moment was pushing her back down onto the sofa and –The abrupt fading of Piers’s crying alerted them both. Chris finished up wrapping the woman’s hand and together they crept down the half-lit hall to Piers’s room. They listened, for a moment, at the door; nothing. Like a single being they moved beyond it, silently, and found Piers once more passed into fretful sleep. The silence pressed in like a warm, physical thing. Beside him, the woman breathed out. He met her eye in the dark.“You should get some sleep while you can,” Chris told her in a whisper when they were back out in the hall again. She glanced uncertainly at Piers’s door.“I’m not sure I can,” she replied. “I forgot how awful it is, all of this.”Chris smiled tiredly and lay his hand against her throat, over her drumming heart. He recalled what she’d said about letting him chew her to bits and his belly gave a little shudder, warmth flooding down the back of his neck. He could smell her blood; her mangled flesh. “I could help,” he murmured as he kissed her, and she sighed against his mouth.“We – shouldn’t,” she panted. “Not while –,” But her pulse gave her away, as did the tightening of her thighs as Chris pushed his hand between them, her shuddering breath when he bit at her mouth. He unwrapped her and carried her back to their own bedroom, and he took her with all the lights on, over and over and over until she was sweating and struggling for breath, her entire body creaking with exhaustion. The blood soaked through the gauze and he lapped it all up before it could even hit the sheets. He longed to bite deep into her, and envied Piers for his inhibition; how desperately he wanted to chew and cleave through bone, to break her apart with his hands and his teeth, to rend her open and make his home in her most intimate, living parts.Thirty-eight hours. She collapsed, her thighs seizing about his hips, and the moment he pulled free of her she fell into a dead sleep. For a moment she appeared a corpse: limp and smeared with blood. She’d bitten through the inside of her cheek and her teeth were brown with it. Gently, he lay her back and wiped her down, and he changed gears from devouring to devotion, though to him they always felt like one and the same. He rewrapped her hand and elevated it up away from harm. Switched off the lights again, their memory dancing dazzling in the dark.Chris sat awake in the darkness of Piers’s room for the rest of the night. He wondered if this was how the woman had felt all those months ago when he was sweating and starving through the same pain, when she had roped him down and watched him suffer. And he understood how much more difficult it was watching a baby – of all things, the least deserving – anguish like this. Unlike him, though, Piers was small and inexperienced and incapable. Guilt lapped at him like the ceaseless wear of the sea. He thought briefly of Iancu, wondering if he had watched Daciana suffer like this. Dawn came and went. The woman woke and seemed like herself again, though she moved with an injured stiffness. Chris was tired, but Piers had stopped shrieking for the time being; Chris worried that he’d busted his vocal cords, but the occasional gurgling babble alleviated his fears. Piers no longer screamed, but he still cried and looked like he was in immense distress, and Chris couldn’t really say things were any better.“It is worse,” the woman told him sullenly as she cradled Piers against her shoulder – the collar of that particular shirt had been ruined for many weeks – after Chris had made them coffee and offered the child meat he would not take. “He can’t talk, can’t understand, can’t communicate. You were strong, and you were used to fear. You talked to me, at least, and you understood the pain. I knew what was going on with you. But Piers is just a baby. He –,” Her voice broke, then, sealed behind her flinching lips, and she glanced away as if she could no longer bear to look at him. She sat right in a swathe of morning sunshine but seemed to be eclipsed by gloom even so. “I hate to see him hurting like this. He must be so afraid.”Chris was about to reply – to go to her, to comfort her somehow – when his phone began ringing. They both stared at it for a moment before Chris lurched across the kitchen to answer it.“Petyr?” he asked after checking the caller ID. But it was not Petyr’s voice that replied.“No!” she exclaimed. “He told me you called him. About Piers.”Something not quite like relief flooded through Chris. “Yeah. He’s –,”“Changing, yes. Petyr is very smart, but he doesn’t know much about useful things, especially not when it comes to babies.” As Chris had been able to feel Petyr’s smile the night before, so too now could he feel the distinct edge of Daciana’s grin through the phone. “Sometimes it happens very young,” she told him. “And sometimes not until they are older. Papa told me it happens usually when the teeth come in.”“How long will it take?” Chris asked, recalling the many days of torturous change he had undergone.“Since he is young it will take not so long,” she replied. “Not as long as you. How long has it been already?”Chris checked the time. “Almost two days.”Daciana hummed. “Soon, then. The first time is always the longest, most painful. You remember that.” She was still grinning, her words stretched thin across it, flayed against its edge. “After that it will be shorter. Easier.”“How can we make it better?” he asked raggedly. “To make it - hurt less.”Daciana fell silent. “There is nothing,” she said gently. “Chris, I cannot lie to you – it is dangerous. You remember what it was like, during your first change. Those of us who were born this way do not have that memory. For us it is easy, like walking or talking; something we learned before we could remember. He will be feeling now like you felt then.”Chris didn’t like that one bit. “He’s just a baby ,” he whispered hoarsely, as if it was somehow Daciana’s fault that his child was suffering. “Has Lucia…?”“Not yet,” Daciana said, though her voice drew tight with anxiety at the thought. “We are waiting. I’m afraid, so make sure you take many notes for me. Perhaps we could write a book.” She tried to laugh, but the sound was strained and humorless, and Chris knew this was no easier for her than it was for them. Together, at least, they could find strength in each other, even if they were thousands of miles apart. “Can I talk to her?”Chris took the phone to the woman and gave it to her, taking Piers into his own arms. He wriggled in discomfort and Chris rubbed his back. The woman began speaking Romanian, quietly, holding the phone to her ear with both hands as if she still wasn’t quite used to it. Chris watched and thought about how much he loved her. Piers began to cry against his shoulder and he took him into the hallway, jogging him a little as Piers tried to chew a hole through his sweater.“I feel your pain, little man,” he murmured into Piers’s dark hair. “It’ll be over soon.” The woman came out to meet them when she was finished with her phone call. She looked a little sallow, but no more than Chris felt, and he kissed her reassuringly.“We’ll be alright,” he said. “All three of us. Together.”And she smiled at him, her love so overwhelming that it summited even her exhaustion, crawling down the face of it and lighting her from within. She turned her face against his chest and, for a moment, Piers ceased his blubbering and gazed at her from his puffy, tear-reddened eyes. She reached up to stroke her finger down his cheek and Chris knew she was trying to conjure up some way of helping - some possible alleviation.“Too young for anything,” she said as if hearing his thoughts. “Tea, salve - they would be toxic.” She sniffed, then, drawing her finger away when Piers opened his mouth in search of it. They left Piers in the living room, moving the coffee table out of the way to position him right in the middle of the carpet. They gave him a wide berth, quiet in their fear, in their uncertainty, and hurting in their empathy. Chris felt like curling up into a ball and crying yet also like running twenty miles. He watched Piers thrash and wail with the same gut-dissolving terror as he had watched his namesake succumb to awful infection. Funny , Chris thought, that two people of the same name, of such love, could awaken the very same pain that little else was able to elicit. It wasn’t funny at all, really, but Chris laughed anyway, muffled in his sweating hands.He took the day off work. The woman stalked around the place like she was about to start crawling up the walls, but the moment Chris suggested she take a walk she glared at him like she might rip out his throat. He took his eyes off her for a few minutes and returned to find her feeding Piers her fingers again.“It makes him feel better!” she hissed when Chris once more detached his son’s gnashing teeth from her hand. She tried to wrench free of him, but he was so immensely strong , and her bones creaked in his grip. She was crying; had been crying for a while, and she was half-naked in her desperation to soothe her child with skin contact, an instinct she couldn’t seem to overcome. Piers was crying, too, a belly-deep plea that made Chris want to crawl out of his skin. “Please let me,” she begged him, and he knew she would willingly – eagerly – sacrifice every single finger if it meant Piers’s pain would lessen.“No,” Chris replied, kissing her open, blood-slick palm.The sun inched further across the floor, fringing Piers’s wriggling form, still swaddled tightly. Chris helped him take water, fed him more of the ground turkey that didn’t seem to be much help at all. The woman watched from where Chris had banished her (the kitchen) and in a single lurch of movement shot out the door, quick as a shadow. She knew Chris would not – could not – follow her. He could not leave Piers on his own, not even for a second, and he would not take him away from the safety of the apartment. But she was not stupid, and he knew she had some sort of plan that would most likely find genius in her own desperation. He wondered what she’d say about her hand. My son tried to eat it. It sounded so ridiculous that Chris nearly laughed – instead, Piers’s offending mouth found his wrist, which had drifted too close in his distraction, and bit down on it with force enough to bring tears to Chris’s eyes.“Fuck,” he wheezed emphatically, quite suddenly glad for the woman’s absence.Thankfully Chris was able to detach his son by the time she returned, which was surprisingly quickly; she shouldered open the door and kicked it shut again with a singular sort of determination. Her eyes were sunken. She dropped to her knees beside them, wrestling with a plastic bag and pulling out a decent slab of vacuum-packed meat, dark and veined and swimming in blood juices. She tore open the package with her teeth and, to Chris’s amazement, bit into it raw.He wanted to ask her what the fuck she was doing, sitting there eating raw meat on their living room floor. But he found himself unable to move at all, immobilized by shock and uncertainty, hypnotized by the way she tore at it. She did not look at him as she picked Piers up, her strong jaw working. Oh, Chris realized with an odd, swooping nausea. She’s – Feeding him.Sitting there on his knees, Chris suddenly felt like he was watching something ancient. Over the course of Piers’s suffering she had gone from an intelligent, observant, mostly-adapted woman to a creature of instinct, driven by desperation and fear. Chris recognized it in himself, too, those emotions – the difference between them, however, was that he had spent decades learning how to discipline them. He had learned to control and leash them close, bury them deep. They had been muted by education and society. But hers lingered close to the surface, exposed when her memory was stripped away and honed sharp by a life of survival, always ready to shutter over.Piers did not bite her. His wailing gurgled and stopped. Though the meat was premasticated it took him time to work through it, and the silence enveloped the room like an early-winter fog. The day waned into evening and the woman crouched with her child, now completely divest of her clothing, feeding it as surely those ancient women did when the curse was new and their children screamed for blood. Piers’s teeth could easily shear though her lips or her tongue, but all fear had been blotted out by the spreading stain of desperation. Would you have done that for me? he wanted to ask her. Chewed my food, fed me from your own mouth? The thought drove deep, perverted, and he knew she would have. There was not a shadow of doubt in his mind. He’d known ever since the day he’d almost torn her throat out that she would give him anything. She’d told him as much, too.That perverted desire seeded regret; he would have feigned weakness if it had meant her tongue in his mouth, her mouth on him.Night crawled ever closer. The darkness was cool and bleaching. She chiseled away at the slab of flesh until Piers burped and vomited, but he did not cry again. She lay on the carpet and held him close to her chest, kissing the mark behind his ear and whispering to him. Chris was overcome by the urge to lay with them, and he did, bracketing his son from the other side and enveloping them both in his arms, and in that moment he felt ancient, too. He could hear his own heartbeat; he could hear hers, rapid as the running feet of a rabbit; he could hear Piers’s, the tiny, furious patter of it. The child was held between them, smoldering like a core of embers, burning. They slept, all three of them together, curled up tight in the den.
Chris was woken by teeth sinking into his clavicle.He should have expected it, really, and in retrospect it was really rather funny, but at that moment in time Chris only felt afraid and a little pissed off. Dazed, he wrenched at the source of pain - his son, perhaps unsurprisingly, had latched onto him like a dog.A dog. The teeth were long and sharp, made for tearing meat. They caught around the bone and held, and Chris rolled onto his back to escape it, taking the child with him. He did not cry out, did not yelp; he only wheezed the same way he had when Piers had bitten him the day before.The woman was roused by his stirring, and when her faculties caught up with what she was seeing, she let out a yelp of surprised, worried laughter. Thankfully for Chris, Piers seemed content with just… biting. He did not tear, nor did he attempt to maul him, and eventually the woman was able to lever his jaw open enough to free Chris of it.She held Piers up an arm’s length away from her body. The swaddle was shredded and hung in strips. Her eyes were wide and horrified, her entire face warped with it as she gazed upon their child. Chris gazed up at him, a steady plip plip of blood dropping down onto his cheek. Silence pounded in his ears.“Jesus,” he whispered hoarsely.Piers was… not human. That was very, very certain. Chris felt like he was in a fever dream, staring up at the monstrous creature in the woman’s hands. It wriggled – no, Chris reminded himself, not it . Piers. It was Piers, half-changed and hideous. Chris wanted desperately to close his eyes, but he couldn’t look away. He’d looked like that, once, malformed and breathing heavily, a mess of leathery flesh and coarse hair. It was an ugly, repulsive thing, and not even Chris’s fatherly instincts could overcome it.“It is why they died,” the woman rasped, carefully carrying Piers across the room. Chris did not move. Could not move. “The cursed children were killed, most of the time. Ungodly, devil-spawn.” She sniffed and wiped her nose with her sleeve, her throat thick with tears. She could not hold Piers as she so desperately wished to – unlike Chris, he did not understand the danger of his teeth and claws, and he reached for his mother with a wail that was more akin to the whimper of a wounded dog. Instead she lay him carefully down on the floor again, where he could not ruin anything but the carpet. She watched him writhe. One of his malformed hands caught his own thigh and sliced it open, and she wailed, throwing herself down and seizing his little wrists so he might not injure himself again. “Can you blame them?” she whispered, fixing Chris with red, raw eyes. “Can you?”Slowly, Chris shook his head. If he was a god-fearing peasant isolated in a tiny village deep in the Romanian backwoods, he probably would’ve thrown the child in a well. But here, now, he knew better. He understood it more than those peasants ever could. With great effort, he rolled over and forced himself to his feet again.The cut on Piers’s leg was not deep, but it was there , and the sight of any wound on his child was enough to make his soul ache. Pulling the first-aid kit from where it sat still open on the coffee table, he patched up Piers’s leg with some steri-strips and a Bob the Builder band-aid.“I don’t want to tie him down,” the woman whispered.“It’s okay,” Chris soothed her. “You don’t have to.” (Later, when it all seemed rather funny to think about, Chris mentioned that they could begin a business making protective wear for toddler werewolves; the woman looked scandalized and swiped at him, laughing.) Sleep came to neither of them. Anxiety kept them awake, infused with adrenaline. Chris failed first, as always, nodding off on the sofa to the sound of the woman’s soft soothing. Her voice suffused from the dark, invisible across the room, almost enough to smother the pathetic sounds of Piers’s suffering.And then Piers screamed for an hour straight, vomited again, and slept.The woman sat on her knees. The city light gleamed against her naked back. The old scars Chris had given her glowed pink against her skin and even though he slept, he still saw the hazy outline of her, a single contour against the blackness of his consciousness. Silence; silence. He felt a strange presence in the back of his throat, prickly and cool and very new. Piers. Had to be. He smelled different, now. Changed.Morning broke cold and clear over Los Angeles. When Chris stirred to the sun in his eyes, the woman was nowhere to be found. Neither was Piers. He jerked into awareness like he’d been slapped, scraping his eyes about the room in search of them. Nowhere. Everything was still and silent. Not a cry, not a whimper. He struggled to his feet, body sluggish with fatigue, and his head spun as all the blood in his body seemed to change direction.Then he heard her. Like birdsong, her voice rising on the morning air, slipping through the cracked-open door to the balcony. His entire body lurched towards the sound of her. There was an instinct, he had learned, right in the core of his body that gravitated to any clue of her presence. It dragged him there.She stood in the angling light, back to the sun, her hair aglow. Not a scrap of clothing on her. Scraped up, bitten raw, dark dried blood still speckled in places she couldn’t see. A smear on her upper lip. She gazed down through half-open eyes at Piers, who slumbered fitfully against her breastbone, all pink flesh and dark hair again, his little hands blunt and useless. All the air left Chis’s lungs in a single, relieved exhale. Love , he thought when he looked at her. He always thought of love when he looked at her. How much he loved her; how much she loved him. How much she loved Piers. Both of them, occupying the hemispheres of her heart and leaving room for nothing else, and all-consuming adoration that made her glow with a holy sort of light, that suspended her pain and her fear and everything in-between. It made her as nonhuman as both of them, the glowing golden madness of her motherhood.Chris knew, then, that it would be alright. Piers yawned and settled. The woman sang to him. Chris watched them and his heart was quiet. Yeah. They’d be alright. They always were, together.